Nuclear Winter First Strike Bobby Akart (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📖

Nation-states that are stockpiling nuclear weapons should also take notice. Indeed, the biggest policy implication of nuclear winter could be that it puts the interests of nuclear-capable nations in greater alignment. Because of nuclear winter, a nuclear war between any two major nuclear weapon states could severely harm each of the others. According to intelligence sources, there are nine total nuclear-armed states with Iran prepared to breakthrough as the tenth. This multiplies the risk of being harmed by nuclear attacks while only marginally increasing the benefits of nuclear deterrence. By shifting the balance of harms versus benefits, nuclear winter can promote nuclear disarmament.

Additional policy implications come from the risk of permanent harm to human civilization. If society takes this risk seriously, then it should go to great lengths to reduce the risk. It could stockpile food to avoid nuclear famine, or develop new agricultural paradigms that can function during nuclear winter.

And it could certainly ratchet up its efforts to improve relations between nuclear weapon states. These are things that we can do right now even while we await more detailed research on nuclear winter risk.

Against that backdrop, I hope you’ll be entertained and informed by this fictional account of the world thrust into Nuclear Winter. God help us if it ever comes to pass.

Real-World News Excerpts

U.S. EXPLODES TEST H-BOMB; EYEWITNESS TELLS BLAST FURY

~ Los Angeles Examiner, November 5, 1952

The blast expanded in seconds to a blinding white fireball more than three miles across (the Hiroshima fireball had measured little more than one-tenth of a mile) and rose over the horizon like a dark sun. The crews of the task force, thirty miles away, felt a swell of heat as if someone had opened a hot oven, heat that persisted long enough to seem menacing. “You would swear that the whole world was on fire,” one sailor wrote home.

Swirling and boiling, glowing purplish with gamma-ionized light, the expanding fireball began to rise, becoming a burning mushroom cloud balanced on a wide, dirty stem with a curtain of water around its base that slowly fell back into the sea.

The wings of the B-36 orbiting fifteen miles from ground zero at forty thousand feet heated to ninety-three degrees almost instantly.

In a minute and a half, the enlarging fireball cloud reached 57,000 feet; in two and a half minutes, when the shock wave arrived at the Estes, the cloud passed 100,000 feet.

The shock wave announced itself with a sharp report followed by a long thunder of broken rumbling.

RUSSIANS SPEED UP CUBA BASES, U.S. PREPARING FURTHER ACTION

~ The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 28, 1962

Nuclear missiles near full operational capability.

The White House said late Friday that a nuclear missile build-up in Cuba is continuing at a rapid pace, “apparently … directed to achieving full operational capability as soon as possible.”

The statement was clearly aimed at warning the Soviets the United States is able to keep watch on their activity in Cuba.

It described the scene at missile sites indicating the Russians had not slowed their attempt to establish ballistic missile launching platforms, despite President Kennedy’s declaration that existence of those sites has brought on the crisis.

INDIA SETS OFF NUCLEAR DEVICE

~ NY Times, May 19, 1974

India conducted today her first successful test of a powerful nuclear device.

The surprise announcement means that India is the sixth nation to have exploded a nuclear device. The others are the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China.

A brief Government statement said that India's Atomic Energy Commission had carried out “a peaceful ‘nuclear explosion’ experiment.” The underground blast took place “at a depth of more than 100 meters,” or about 330 feet, the statement said.

In exploding the device, India was entirely within her rights in international law, Government officials said.

NORTH KOREA WITHDRAWS FROM NUCLEAR TREATY

~ UK Guardian, January 10, 2003

The North Korean nuclear-weapons crisis intensified today as Pyongyang announced it is withdrawing from the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Under the treaty, North Korea was barred from making nuclear weapons, but said it was pulling out of it today with immediate effect, blaming US aggression for its decision.

North Korea warned the United States against taking retaliatory military action, saying it would "finally lead to the third world war". However, the regime routinely issues such inflammatory comments.

The North Korean government said in a statement carried on KCNA, its official news agency: "We can no longer remain bound to the Nonproliferation Treaty, allowing the country's security and the dignity of our nation to be infringed upon.”

NORTH KOREA ALLEGEDLY HELPING IRAN BUILD NUCLEAR WEAPONS

~ The Independent, May 29, 2015

An Iranian dissident group said Thursday a delegation of North Korean nuclear weapons experts was in Iran in April visiting a heavily guarded secret military site, presumed to be a nuclear weapons development facility.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which exposed the existence of a key Iranian nuclear weapons facility in 2002 and significant, illicit Iranian nuclear weapons developments since then, said this was the third visit to Iran in 2015 by a North Korean delegation.

Also, citing confidential information from sources inside Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, research and aerospace agencies, said in a statement another group of North Korean nuclear weapons experts is slated to return to Iran in June.

Iran’s hardline government has repeatedly said it is pursuing a nuclear program for peaceful purposes. But the deputy director of NCRI’s Washington-based U.S. office said the group has uncovered what he called a “big, big, red flag”.

During North Korea’s third nuclear weapons test in February 2013, according to NCRI, Iran’s top nuclear experts traveled to Pyongyang to observe the trial.

Epigraph

No war really comes unexpectedly. The drums are beating long before a single shot is fired.

~ Margaret Case Harriman, Author

It is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war.

~ U.S. President John F. Kennedy

If we don’t end war, war will end us.

~ H. G. Wells, English Writer

The survivors of a nuclear holocaust will envy the dead.

~ Nikita Khrushchev,